Korea Nuke Talks On Hold

A delay in planned six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear activities appeared certain Thursday, with North Korea saying it won't talk until South Korea fully discloses the details of its secret atomic experiments.

China, host of three previous rounds of talks, acknowledged "many difficulties" stand in the way of holding new six-party talks on the dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons development this month as planned.

"It is down to North Korea and the United States," Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said in Beijing. "There are many difficulties for the talks to be held as planned."

Kong gave no details but appealed to the participants to "make efforts so we can hold the next round before the end of September, as we agreed earlier."

North Korea relayed its position on future talks when British Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell visited Pyongyang earlier this week, an unidentified spokesman of the North Korean Foreign Ministry told the North's official news agency, KCNA.

The comments further clouded U.S.-led international efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear activities.

During Rammell's four-day visit that ended Tuesday, North Korea "clarified its stand that it can never sit at the table to negotiate its nuclear weapon program unless truth about the secret nuclear experiments in South Korea is fully probed," KCNA quoted the North Korean spokesman as saying.

South Korea recently acknowledged that it conducted a plutonium-based nuclear experiment more than 20 years ago. That admission came shortly after it said it conducted a uranium-enrichment experiment four years ago.

Plutonium and enriched uranium are two key ingredients of nuclear weapons.

South Korea has denied any ambition to possess nuclear arms.

Three rounds of talks by China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia haven't produced major progress toward settling the North Korean nuclear dispute. The six nations had previously agreed to meet again by the end of this month, but no date has been set.

Washington wants North Korea to halt its nuclear activities immediately. North Korea says it will freeze its nuclear facilities as a first step toward their eventual dismantling only if the United States lifts economic sanctions and provides energy and economic aid.

A senior U.S. official said this week that North Korea has decided to wait until at least after the Nov. 2 U.S. presidential elections to start talking again.

The North Korean spokesman said his government clarified to Rammell that "it does not care who becomes U.S. president and that it considers the U.S. policy toward the (North) as the only yardstick."

In Seoul, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said he was confident that investigations by a U.N. nuclear watchdog will prove his country's nuclear experiments were not conducted for weapons advancement.

"It is regrettable that some section of the international community is raising suspicions on the transparency of our peaceful nuclear power activities without having basis on the truth," Ban told reporters.

The remarks came after the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said earlier this week that Seoul's failure to report the unauthorized experiments was a matter of serious concern.

Also Thursday, Britain's ambassador to North Korea traveled to the site of a massive explosion to verify claims by the North that it wasn't caused by a nuclear test.

Ambassador David Slinn left in the morning on a chartered plane to visit the site of the Sept. 9 blast, the British Embassy in Beijing said. He was accompanied by diplomats from Sweden, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and Mongolia, Rammell said in London.

"We welcome the speed in which the North Koreans set up the visit following my request to Foreign Minister Paek on Monday," Rammell said.

"The diplomats inspected the site for 90 minutes and were allowed to take photographs of the area. The information they gathered will be reported back to technical experts in capitals. We now need to await their findings."

The size of the reported explosion and its timing on the 56th anniversary of North Korea's founding had raised speculation that it might be a nuclear test. Experts say they don't believe the blast near the Chinese border was a nuclear test. North Korea has said the blast was part of demolition work for a hydroelectric project.

The North Korean nuclear dispute emerged in the autumn of 2002 when a U.S. envoy claimed an official from the North admitted they were experimenting with plutonium.

That led the U.S. and its allies to cut off fuel supplies to the North, and the North in response through out international nuclear inspectors and said it would no longer abide by the nuclear nonproliferation treaty.

The North also pledged to resume a uranium-processing effort that it had suspended under a 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration.

North Korea is already suspected of possessing a few crude nuclear devices and a missile capable of reaching the United States.

Pyongyang says its nuclear pursuits are a defense against American aggression, pointing to the Bush administration's policy of preemptive war as seen in Iraq. The North also says it wants a nuclear deterrent so it can reduce the size of its million-man armed forces.

The North has demanded written security guarantees from the United States in return for ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Washington has resisted any written guarantees, but the Bush administration has said it has no intention of invading the country.

North and South Korea have never formally ended the 1950-53 Korean War and are separated by a heavily mined demilitarized zone. Roughly 40,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea as a bulwark against possible invasion from the North.

The United States lists North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism and President Bush in 2002 labeled the country part of an "axis of evil" with Iraq and Iran.